Making a decision often requires information—answers—generated by making other decisions.

A decision has authorities such as policies, regulations, best practices, and expertise that define how it should be made.

A decision can have analytic insight that shows how it can be improved or made more accurately.

Not all decisions are automated; a manual decision can still be modeled and managed.

3. Use Decision Management Technologies

The details of how a decision is to be made can be represented with business rules, decision tables, decision trees, analytic models, optimization algorithms, and other decision metaphors.

When implementing a decision-making solution, a mix of technologies (business rules, data mining, predictive analytics, and optimization) may be appropriate.

If technology is applied to a decision, it may be to support a human decision-maker or to explicitly automate and manage the decision.

Technology may be applied to a decision and any decisions on which it depends, or only to some decisions in a model or process.

4. Deploy as Decision Management Systems

Decision Management Systems consist of decision services and supporting infrastructure for managing decision-making. They are not simply business rules or analytics embedded in business processes or user interfaces.

A Decision Management System is decoupled from and provides decision-making to existing systems, business processes, or event processing environments.

5. A Decision Management System Has

Design transparency—to see exactly how the decision will be made in the future.

Execution transparency—to reconstruct how a specific instance of a decision was made in the past.

Impact analysis—to assess the business impact of a change before it is made.

A closed loop—for continuous improvement, and to test and learn, experiment and adapt.

v. 10/7/2013

We’ve published the Decision Management Manifesto to help organizations like yours design, build, and implement decision management systems with business rules and predictive analytics. The manifesto was developed in collaboration with many experienced practitioners, software vendors, and consulting firms. Because the field of Decision Management is evolving, so will the manifesto. Because it is focused on core principles, not on technology features, the manifesto will remain largely stable but it is not static. We welcome your feedback.

Thank you to Sako-san, Shimizu-san, Tsushima-san and Fukushima-san, Emmanuel Bonnet, Plugtree, BCS, Gestão Inovadora, Lux Magi and Tobias Vigmostad of Decisive AS for providing these translations.

Sharing the Decision Management Manifesto

The Decision Management Manifesto can be freely circulated, printed, and reproduced in its entirety, provided no edits are made to it. You can download a copy here.

Please contact us with your feedback and if you would like to translate, extract, or include the manifesto in your Decision Management materials.

Learn More

Download the Decision Management Manifesto White Paper to learn more. This white paper describes the motivation for the manifesto – why we created it and why organizations and individuals are supporting it – and explains the reasoning and value proposition of each of the five sections.